Nigel McCourry is an Iraq War veteran. He’s one of a burgeoning number of people – veterans and non-veterans – alike who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Nigel’s PTSD resulted from his experiences as an active-duty service member in the Marines during the Iraq War from 2003-4. He identified two major events that caused his emotional and mental derailing: one involved an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) that detonated beside him; and the other, his unintentional killing of two little girls in a truck driven by their father who drove his vehicle straight into a firefight.
I met Nigel at a MAPS conference in 2017, in Oakland, California. He is about six feet tall with chestnut coloured hair, and a receding hairline. He is polite, well-spoken and unassuming. Any outwardly military persona he may have embodied fourteen years before, as an active-duty Marine in the Iraq War, had vanished. Mostly, he was interested in helping get word about the MDMA treatment studies out into the world. He was more than willing to help solve the problem of rampant PTSD among Iraq war veterans.
PTSD is an international health catastrophe. To put it in perspective: as of 30 June, 2016, more than 868,000 veterans with PTSD were receiving disability benefits costing in sum $17 billion per year in the US alone. Few if any have received care for their PTSD or the problems arising from self-medication with alcohol and drugs.
Among non-veterans, that is in the general adult population in the US, who have not experienced active combat, 7.8 percent will develop PTSD during their lifetimes, caused by childhood abuse, sexual abuse, domestic violence and a number of other factors. That is: approximately 24,874,200 people. The fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic will produce a huge new wave of trauma survivors who require immediate treatment: those first-line health care workers who triaged and treated affected patients.
Send the Marines
Nigel enlisted in the Marines at the beginning of the Iraq War, in 2003. He was 22. Watching hours of footage and news reporting from the front lines, Nigel began to wish he was there. He took the White House’s assertion about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction in good faith. He felt it was a just war and could see no good reason not to join the cause. He wanted to be part of it, to “experience history unfolding firsthand” and to be “part of something bigger than myself.” He wanted to make a difference in the world.
Three years earlier, when he was a senior in high school, his family had relocated from Washington state to South Carolina. Feeling out of place, and unmotivated at his new school, he dropped out. He passed the Graduate Equivalent Degree exam (GED) soon afterwards. Then he enrolled in community college at Greenville Technical College. As far as career and life decisions were concerned, he was still uncertain.
The Marine Corps appealed to him from the start. He admired their boots-on-the-ground discipline and their courage under fire.
Until the invasion of Iraq, Nigel had not thought about joining the armed forces.
Nigel’s was a military family. His grandfather, father and uncles all served. Nigel’s grandfather on his father’s side served in the Army Air Corps (the service predecessor to the Air Force) in WWII. He was in the Air Force unit that accompanied the US Marine Corps during the island campaigns in the Pacific.
Nigel had been close to his grandfather. Nigel’s grandfather’s war experience was “major history” in the family, and a big part of the family heritage. “Grandaddy” was regarded with a kind of reverence.
Nigel’s father joined the Air Force at the beginning of Vietnam War. Stationed in eastern Europe as a signals intelligence officer, he never saw active duty. One of Nigel’s uncles joined the Air Force, where he became a load master. Another uncle, however, joined the Navy, where he trained as radio operator.
“We don’t talk about that uncle much,” Nigel told me wryly. “He’s the black sheep because he joined a service other than the Air Force.”
When Nigel began to consider enlisting, his family assumed he’d join the Air Force. “No pressure, right?” he said, smiling.
Nigel forewent telling his family about which service branch really interested him: the Marine Corps Infantry. “They wouldn’t have been happy about that,” he said. “I didn’t want to shock them too much at first.”
He decided to interview with all of the branches in any case, to get a sense of what each could offer.
His first visit was to the Air Force recruitment office, where he spoke with the recruiter. It didn’t seem like a good fit, especially since he was a high school drop out. The Air Force thinks of itself as recruiting only the most “intellectually capable.” School performance mattered a lot.
Next was the Army, who were offering $20,000 enlistment bonuses. All the same, it didn’t feel like good fit either.
Nigel was even less impressed by his visit to the navy recruitment office: “They were all out of shape and overweight,” he said. They were hardly the kind of service member Nigel respected.
Then came the Marine Corps recruitment office. As soon as he started speaking with the recruiter, he knew he’d found what he was looking for. The recruiter, knowing Nigel had been offered an enlistment bonus by the Army, countered with a promise of intangible benefits far greater than any other service corps had on offer. “We’re not going to give you money,” was the message. “We’re going to give you far more in the way of training and experience than you’ll find anywhere else.”
He found something sturdy and professional about the Marines. At the same time they were relatable and personable. Nigel had a distinct sense of clicking with them, the sense that they didn’t do what the other branches did. They did their own thing their way, and it was better. The discipline and training appeared to be higher quality and more demanding physically than what the Army infantry offered. The Marines, as he saw it, had developed a training method, and had it down to a science, at the level of the most minute detail. They produced more disciplined troops. But there was a downside, he learned, once he entered basic training: nothing was ever good enough. On the other hand, in combat, he discovered, attention to detail was the trait you were looking for.
Nigel’s family was far from happy with his decision. His grandfather cried when he told him he’d joined the Marines
Nigel had never really thought much about the violence of war. He envisioned confronting certain kinds of fears and facing challenging positions. He admits, in hindsight, that he was very naive when he joined up. The day-to-day horror of live combat was absent from the family mythology, despite the long service careers of several members. His father and his uncles had never seen active combat. None one had served in the infantry. None had battlefield tales to tell.
Nigel departed for basic training at Parris Island, South Carolina in June of 2003.
Basic training was, he said, a lot like what he’d heard. Physically, he found the experience what he expected: demanding and gruelling. Nothing felt insurmountable. The really tough parts were tough for unexpected reasons. The almost-constant verbal abuse by officers was a shock to the system.
“I wasn’t very good at it,” he recalls. “Hours and hours of being yelled at and abused without letting the drill sergeant rock my world.”
At first, he recalled, he thought “these were jerks who needed more love in their lives.” He spent days wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
Then he began to realize there was a method in it: he was being subjected to a desensitization process to inure him to emotional overload. “You can have all the yelling and abuse and still function and do what you need to do.”
A lot of guys, however, did not have the same sort of adaptive attitude. Many were caught off guard by their surroundings and by the physical and mental demands thrown at them from the moment they arrived.
Some simply could not stand the rigor of the experience, and would light out for the swamp for days, just to get away. Parris Island has one road in and one road out. Most would-be escapees were returned to camp.
Nigel graduated from boot camp on September 11, 2003. His parents came down to Parris Island and brought Grandaddy. Despite his initial unhappiness at Nigel’s choice of service branch, his grandfather let Nigel know how proud he was. Nigel was, all said, the only grandchild who had entered the service. There was a lot he shared with him that he simply didn’t with any of the cousins, or Nigel’s sister.
The next training phase took place at the School of Infantry at Camp Geiger, North Carolina, a satellite installation of Camp Lejeune where marines trained in basic combat skills. Enlistees could choose what infantry specialty they wanted, although there was a kicker. “There’s what you want versus what they need,” said Nigel. “They can throw you where they need you any day.”
Most guys elected to be rifleman: “the guys who are kicking in the doors during invasions.”
Weapons specialties—mortars, specifically—appealed to Nigel more because they required calculation, and a certain mental acumen.
When his mortar training was over, Nigel was assigned to a fleet Marine unit: 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines Fox company, stationed across town, at Camp Lejeune. In late 2003, Nigel visited his parents for the last time before his deployment. His unit was sent to March Air Force Reserve Base outside Riverside, California, where the abandoned base housing was used for urban warfare training. Training scenarios were made to be as realistic as possible with soldiers playing the part of civilian Iraqis. It was, said Nigel, “supposed to get us accustomed to the rhythm of operations, once we were in country.”